When St. Louis Magazine began this project, they had a few goals in mind. The biggest goal was to communicate with readers that they had rebranded. SLM wanted readers to know that they are more than a magazine, and are working toward the image of being a digital media company that presents information to their viewers on platforms that they use. They also wanted to be more influential by having an “accessible, open and transparent voice” on their social platforms.”

Project Lead: Steph Zimmerman, Digital Media Editor. Zimmerman has worked at SLM as the digital media manager for the last two years. She is responsible for overseeing SLM Media Group’s digital products, contributes editorial content to stlmag.com as well as to the print issues of St. Louis Magazine, St. Louis Family and St. Louis At Home. She also designs web-exclusive features, analyzes monthly analytics, contributes to social media platforms, produces weekly editorial e-newsletters, and manages use of third-party software. You can connect with her via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Hear from Zimerman about her newsroom’s experience:

For the share yourselves and your process strategy, this video did really well. It had a 100% completion rate, and a significantly higher engagement rate that the average. The video showed the process of how each magazine comes together.

Under host meaningful conversation, this op-ed had nearly double the engagement rate of RNS’s average and invited users to share their opinion on a controversial transportation project. This post about a new policy at Schnucks grocery store not only had double the engagement rate of the average, but it also had 25 comments. This post really got people talking about their opinions on the new policy.

For examples of what didn’t work quite as well, the newsroom experienced a few downfalls when it came to posting too much text. Under the communicate your core value with other content strategy. This post is an example of a core value getting lost in a large amount of text. This post under host meaningful conversation and this post under invite users to help you inform the world seemed to have the same issue. Each of these stories failed to foster the conversation that they aimed to produce, and had lower than average engagement rates.